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journalists

This week there were two readings for the final week of class. The first was “The Tigger Talk: On LIfe, the Process, and Everything” by Brad King: The Appalachian Geek. He starts by writing “grades don’t matter,” which honestly nearly made me fall out of my chair since my mom was a teacher and in our house, grades did matter.

Instead King says, it’s the process that matters because in failure we learn. He mentions that 10 years from now not many of us will remember our friends or what happened in each of our college classes. Instead, we will be working hard, staying in and being too tired to make those important decisions in life.

Let’s move on to talking about Eeyore. Yes, you know the type. That one person who is all about sadness and drama. King talks about who these people and why they became that way. Hopefully you don’t travel down the same road. King’s post reminds us that life isn’t about the big events, it is all about the small events. What’s more, we don’t have control over these events. Yet, we do have control over how we see and how we react to such events. This leads us to the idea that we all want to be Tigger. We want to think positively and move through life thinking about the process, instead of the grade.

The other article I read was “10 Questions for Journalists” by Matt Thompson. I’m going to cover just a couple of them since you really should click the link and read the article in its entirety.

#1 – Are we making our community feel better-informed or merely distracted?

Here Thompson discusses how the design and layout of a page are essential to whether the community will be distracted or if the page can work to inform. Deliberate choices are important.

#2 – How important is this for our community and why?

This brings up the important question of immediacy vs. importance. Here Thompson labels local traffic as cheap, or the one-night-stand traffic. He instead wants a relationship with his visitors; for his visitors to see the value.

#3 – Are we chasing the largest story, or just the latest story?

The larger story is more important and respond to actual events, instead of just time.

“The Curation Economy and the 3C’s of Information Commerce” is an interesting article about how social media creation and curation has changed in the last few years. The article noted that in 2010 almost 70% of people on social media merely consumed and did not create. This means they didn’t post and they didn’t comment. Now millions of social media users post blogs, use photo-sharing sites and are active on social platforms. In today’s age, there are 3 types of social media users: creators, curators and consumers. Read the article to find out more.

In “Curation, and Journalists as Curators” Mindy McAdams lists ways journalists are curators. Journalists can provide the world with the best representatives or links to resources. Journalists should also not be afraid to cull and make sure to only include the best links. Journalists should also provide context, pay attention to the arrangement of the piece and look at the organization as a whole. Finally, the journalist serves as the curator of the piece because they are the expert. Updating you work is also important.

No, I’m not talking about the kid from the movie “The Goonies.” I’m talking about data-driven journalism.

This week I read “Data-Driven Journalism Trends for 2014” on Digital Amy’s blog. She gives her top 5 trends for 2014 starting with sensor data. Sensor data comes from devices that contain sensors such as a running watch or your fridge. This is an upcoming trend because we expect to see sensors in more and more products. “All these devices contain tiny bits of data that in aggregate can be quite eye opening of bigger societal patterns and trends of what is happening in the world today,” the blogger writes. Often sensor data helps third party entities or manufactures to gain information about the consumer and it’s a guess as to what sensor data will be used for in 2014.

The second trend was a growing use of d3 for mapping. Mapping data continues to be a hot topic and with Data Drive Documents (d3), this looks to continue. She uses this awesome Wired article to explain how more people, especially journalists will use d3 in the future.

Trend three is all about libraries, which we know I love. Instead of physical libraries, these are data libraries and should be helpful to all of us. There is a growing number of data libraries, although that’s not terribly surprising as collections of media are becoming more popular. It’s much the same with digital storytelling, which you can read about on my What’s Your Story blog.

Trend four looks at JavaScript, HTML5 and jQuery. Now if you haven’t worked with these three before, you are in for an interesting year in 2014. As more developers and web gurus begin to use these three in combination, interactivity and intuitively are really going to see an increase on many websites. HTML5 already fascinates me with how it encompasses and alleviates issues from previous coding languages so I can’t wait to see what these three can do together.

The last trend deals with analysis and meaning of the data, which is fantastic because sometimes it seems like journalists are a bit scared of actually explaining those statistics they included. I definitely agree with Digital Amy that we want to see the beautiful infographic or display, but we also want to know the meaning behind what you’re showing us.

That was the only reading for this week so this was a short one. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

This week there were quite a few readings so I will more quickly summarize them than I normally do, but first here’s the trailer from “The Social Network,” a movie about Facebook’s start.

The first thing I read was “Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace” by Danah Boyd. In her article, Boyd notes how social media networks could possibly cause shifts to class divisions, especially among teenagers. She points out that Facebook is for those teens that come from educated families and emphasize going to college. The teens using MySpace on the other hand are those who are expected to enter the workforce or join the army after graduating high school or the “alternative” kids. Now this article was written in 2007 so I’m sure much of what she said has changed, but the idea of social networking influencing class is an interesting topic and why the article is worth reading. If you like this article, I also read Boyd’s post “MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care).”

“How Black People Use Twitter” by Farhad Manjoo was an interesting read, as he notes that hashtags used by black people seem to be more prevalent on the networking site. From this, he also noted that black people tend to use Twitter differently than other races. For example, they follow each other more easily, join in conversations more, form tighter clusters and retweet one another more. In addition, there tend to be a higher population of black people on the social networking site. To learn why black people use Twitter differently, make sure to read the article.

The article “Twitter Offers News Orgs Opportunity to Reach Diverse, Underserved Communities” addresses the same idea of how minorities are using the service. The article talked about some of the interesting demographics related to minorities on Twitter and how news organizations could use this information to reach those demographics. Twitter is great for news and information and many groups on Twitter use the service for that type of information. For younger members of the service, many of them are using Twitter as a social tool for informal communication between peers.

The most interesting article I read was “Facebook, Private Traits and Attributes: Predictions from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” The article discussed the ever popular topic of online privacy in relation to social media. More and more people are using privacy settings online to reduce available information about themselves, yet those that use social media are less diligent about privacy and may have a false sense of control. The article discussed a study where they used Likes on Facebook to determine certain demographics about the person. Here are a few findings:

88% of the time for men and 75% of the time for women, researchers were able to predict a user’s sexual orientation

95% of the time, researchers were able to predict a user’s ethnic origin

93% of the time, researchers were able to predict a user’s gender

Lastly, I read two academic article. The first was “From Dabblers to Omnivores: A Typology of Social Network Site Usage.” The second was related to uses and gratifications theory. “Attachment Needs and Social Networking Sites” compared real life friendships to those formed through a social networking site. Heavy use of a social network leads to the need to satisfy a sense of belonging. The researchers found that the tested subjects used social networking as a way to fill the need of belonging and that social media allows a alternative way for the subjects to meet an attachment need.

I experimented using the location-based checkin service of Foursquare for the first time this past week. The main place I checked in was work everyday. Since I work for a public library, there were a few other people that checked in regularly. There were also a few problems with the library profile that I need to fix. It had a really old picture and was listed as a college library, rather than a public library. Luckily I also had to travel for work this week so I had more check ins than I normally would. This allowed me to experiment a bit with badges and tips. Interestingly, not many places I checked in had badges and the tips for each place were minimal. To be relevant to my blog topic, I wandered downtown and checked in at a few local bookstores.

I also posted a few reviews to Yelp this week. The town I live in has a very active downtown area and the majority of restaurants in town are locally-owned. I searched around and read reviews for several of the local restaurants and what I found was interesting. First, I noticed that not many Laramie residents were posting reviews. This could be because it’s a small town so most locals know what is good and what isn’t, and most poor restaurants go out of business quickly since there isn’t a huge new client base if people don’t like your food. Second, the majority of people posting reviews were travelers passing through or students who would only be here a few years. This was interesting because it seems to be rather the norm for Yelp, so if I really decide to start posting to the site I may want to consider doing so when I travel to other cities.

There are several ways PR professionals and journalists could use location-based services. For the library, it’s a good way to look into some of our patrons who are more tech-savvy and use the service as a way to retain their patronage. Several other businesses in my area could use the services to increase their customer base, as I did not receive an incentive or badge from any local check in. For journalists, it makes it easier to balance a story, as you can easily find a positive and negative review for the place/business you’re covering.

This week’s readings were all about search engine optimization and web analytics. I really enjoyed these readings because this is a big part of what I do day-to-day at my job where I manage library websites and social media. Last semester, I did a project on drafting social media policies and a project on creating goals and a dashboard related to the library website. I’ll be sharing a few pieces of those projects in this post since it directly relates to the readings.

Reach – This is kind of an obvious one you would want to track since it concerns audience growth rate. Reach allows you to track growth over time, which is positive because you can see the highs and lows of when your audience is at its peaks during the year. For example, I work for a public library in a college town. From tracking our reach on a monthly basis, we know that we are going to have a decrease in audience growth during the summer because a good portion of the town population is gone. For this same reason, we know we will see a spike in audience growth when the school year starts up and new incoming students begin to follow the library.

Engagement – I have found that many novices to social media really pinpoint on the reach metric and how important it can be to your business, leading them to not pay as much attention to engagement. This is a BIG mistake because while reach shows you the size of your audience, engagement allows you to understand if what you’re posting is actually something your audience is interested in. Social engagement is not happening if you’re followers are silent participants.

Acquisition – With acquisition, you will want to have some sort of web analytics being reported for your website, as this allows you to see how many people you’re pushing to your website from social media. Acquisition lets you know which audience members are returning vs. new and where they came from.

Conversion – This metric allows you to connect social media date to what it’s doing for your business. This is easier to track when your business involves profits, but non-profits have been starting to use it more frequently as well.

Activity – This shows the actual impact on your business. With activity, you can track if your business is saving money by using social media.

Another article I read this week was “A Scientific Guide to Writing Great Headlines on Twitter, Facebook and Your Blog.” This article had some great ideas and actually shows you some trial-and-error moments so you can visually see what worked and didn’t work. For example, the article found that using action words (verbs instead of nouns) was helpful in Twitter posts. It also gave a list of the top 20 most retweetable words and the correct way to post pictures to Facebook.

The article also noted research related to photos, such as photos outperform other types of posts and will get higher engagement. Be careful with this idea though because it doesn’t work for everyone. For instance, at the library I work at text posts will get the highest reach and engagement, while photos and links to websites tend to fall flat.

One thing I thought these articles left out was the idea that social media continues to change. One day the types of posts your business is using might do phenomenally, while other days they may do nothing for your company. This could be because your audience changes or it is a low time in the year. However, one other explanation social media professionals should be ready for is a change to the algorithm that determines what shows up in a follower’s feed. This happens periodically with Facebook and suddenly your posts are not doing as well because less people are seeing them due to a system change. Social media professionals should be prepared for this type of problem and have ideas ready to circumvent this problem when it happens.

This is the last week for the Clay Shirky readings, as we have come to the end of the book. I also will summarize an academic article on YouTube in this post so I will make the Shirky summary quick. In Ch. 10, he shares a story of a group called Site Specific attempting to work with AT&T and a “fight” about what type of support to use. The Site Specific people wanted to use Perl, an online community, while the AT&T people wanted to use C++, a commercial support system, but one more complicated than Perl. Today these online community forums are the norm. Yes maybe large companies aren’t using them, but the majority of the public is. These types of fights I’m sure are still common in today’s workplace as old generations meet new generations, and with technology changing so quickly, taking a chance on a new development may seem disastrous to the old generation. Yet technology continues to change and these risks can yield large benefits. In Ch. 11, I enjoyed reading about the White Bicycle program in Amsterdam and the Digg revolt. Both worth reading about if you get a chance. Finally, in the epilogue, Shirky discusses how he has had to relearn many things as technology changes. In comparison, his younger students do not struggle nearly as much with new technological discoveries because they did not learn the things Shirky now has to unlearn.

The academic article I read was “Exploring personal branding on YouTube.” The article discussed the processes individuals use to brand themselves and how these individuals brand themselves on YouTube. The study used qualitative research in the from of in-depth interviews with Taiwanese participants between the ages of 16 and 35. Each participant was asked questions related to their personal YouTube channel or videos. The findings noted that there are 3 stages of personal branding: extract, express and exude. Each participant had a unique promise of personal value for their branding. The participants planned ahead and were careful about editing to make sure the videos were as they imagined. Each of the participants expressed themselves using a personal brand statement. Lastly, to exude, the participants each had a strategy for how they would attract worldwide viewers. In short, the individual attempt to achieve their goals while engaging different strategies for promotion. Additionally, most of the participants formed a consumer-personal brand relationship, meaning the viewer and performer felt a mutual sense of commitment and belonging. The article concluded that organizations and companies wanting to form a similar relationship need to think more about the mutual relationship and less about the company providing a one-sided relationship.